personal traditions/celebrations/holidays?

[aurelie]

hi there melonland forums!!

recently i've been thinking about traditions and holidays and stuff, i think they're neat and awesome, though because of my own opinions, i just dont really like the origins or the reasons they're traditionally celebrated. or they're just not that important to me in that aspect. i'm not a religious or really spiritual person (kinda grew up christian though), and the family i still got are pretty relaxed about it all, though out of like tradition i guess, we still like to celebrate the typical stuff like christmas or easter, though it's very much more about just. meeting and celebrating and stuff and not real dogma or belief or whatever.

that being said, i've been thinking about just starting my own traditions and such for me, friends and family, centered more about just mutual aid, warmth and connection rather than spirituality and stuff. made up stuff, just for the reason i actually enjoy holidays: an excuse for spending time with people i love, but also it having a nice thought behind it that can just be universal. i was thinking of like anchoring them around solstices and equinoxes cause its just a thing that happens in regular intervals and could have some sort of meaning. also i am a sucker for symbolism and all that, and think it would be cool to have little rituals tied to them, maybe just lighting candles to represent warmth or something. maybe gift giving as well. i dunno! just think its neat ideas :)

wanted to also ask, does anyone here engage with this sorta stuff? any personal traditions/holidays n such? ideas? :D

i also have no idea if there's a term or word for this sorta stuff :p

_{also just to add. i don't mind religious worship, long standing traditions and whatever!! you do what you wanna, i just dont really vibe with it!}

[Dan Q]

Like many folks here in the UK, we have a pretty secular celebration of culturally-Christian festivals: e.g. we give gifts and eat too much on Christmas Day, as people have... well, to celebrate the midwinter since long before Christmas. We have an Easter Egg hunt on Easter. Etc.

But we've got a few of our own too.

We celebrate Family Day each year; a holiday we made up to celebrate the fact that we get to be a family. We started with it after winning a legal battle against a social worker who'd taken a bigoted view on the unconventional relationships between the adults in our family shared and seemed to take a personal interest in trying to ensure that we lost custody of our kids (it was a rough year!). So nowadays, every year we celebrate with a family outing, and gifts for the children, and generally loving that we get to all continue to be together.

On New Year's Eve we have a tradition of doing a book exchange. We stole this from some country where apparently it's commonplace, but I forget which one! Anyway: in our case everybody at our house gives a book to everybody else at our house: it can be new or pre-loved, whichever. And then we sit up late by candlelight and read our new books together. It's incredibly wholesome.

Valentines Day never really suited us - again, it's not terribly well-geared to folks in our kind of configuration - but we've sorta repurposed it into a general celebration of love. We stay in and drink. Not least because getting a table for three on Valentines Day is a pain in the arse.

Some years I move my birthday by six months so I can have it in the summer instead of the winter. No biggie.

And then there's the wackier things. Every year on 25 October I eat a crisp sandwich, and sometimes blog about it. Every year on 25 May I make sure I know where my towel is, which has resulted in my being seen cycling around Oxford with one worn as a scarf, or turning up to a meeting with clients with one around my shoulders.

I'm sure there's more, but that's about it from me/us.

[Noah_S]

August 23 is eat your favorite pastry day for me.

[Nael]

For me and my loved ones religious holidays are just an excuse to get together, the religious meaning of it all is entirely ignored. I really like the idea of the personal traditions tho, and now I really wish I had some! There is a religious holiday here where you are supposed to only eat fish instead of any other meat but a lot of people I know take this opportunity to do an actual barbecue with everything but fish, it's their way of celebrating and getting together but giving a middle finger to the religious part of it ahahh :D

[nobo]

I love holidays in a completely religious way. I actually never appreciated holidays before I became religious. It was just thing our culture does with no meaning. Once I became Catholic though, I realized there is a lot more holidays than we're aware of from a secular perspective. The whole calandar is marked by feast days and solemnities of this and that saint or various aspects of the religious narrative. It's really fun and makes you feel connected to the calandar. You can imagine your ancestors going back hundreds of years and they have their own versions of these holidays.

I also like to think about the prechristian elements of our culture and how they blended in with the religious holidays. But at that point it gets murky, because a lot of stuff is very speculative and we really don't know as many things as we would like to know. But some things are a lot more verifiable than others.

It's interesting how Christmas has more verified pre-Christian elements than Halloween does. There are theories about pagan origins of Halloween but it's way, way, way more speculative than the pagan origins of Christmas.

Even though I'm Catholic I don't consider these things problematic. It's fun to continue the ways of our ancestors, even if we are different from them, and even if all the details aren't always clear.